Internet of Things for businesses is more about the data, the application and services that is those ‘things’ enabled rather than the things themselves, writes Martin Walshaw at Memeburn.

The key to an effective IoT strategy also calls for a scalable and reliable network, as well as software defined application services, or what he describes as a “centralised application service fabric that can operate across physical, virtual and cloud environments.” The reasoning is that IoT applications will have their own requirements in terms of latency and availability, which needs to be delivered as traffic builds up.

At the same time, the infrastructure needs to be flexible to cope with different traffic loads without driving up costs.

IoT also comes with its own challenges, namely security.

“Of course, more devices connecting to your network also means more threats. All these new devices connected to the internet offer a new route for cyber attackers to take – a new way of getting into your network and snaffling private, sensitive information. A distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, for example, could be much more devastating considering the number of devices potentially affected,” he said.

Adding to the complexity is the fact that chances are different IoT applications will shift data to different data centres that host them, hence a centralised (traditional) defense architecture is unlikely to be enough.

“An IoT security architecture will need to adopt a multi-layered approach to ensure true end-to-end protection, from application layer firewalls to access management to remote access security and everything in between,” he added.

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